Wednesday, January 21, 2009

[review was originally at Aylmer's Grisly Grimey Page of Unspeakable Horror, circa 1999]

Darkness has a tagline "Even the dead will scream". For the people who've watched this film it should go "The Alive will laugh". Darkness is a low budget, amateurish vampire gorefest by Leif Jonkers. So with a name like that you'd expect it to be good.

It's not all that bad if you view it under the constraints and guidelines of horror-core. (The state in which all horror movies that gross you out should be viewed under). The opening scene has a guy getting his head blown off in a convenience store and a trench coat mafia wannabe taking the helm as he leads some bewildered kids against the killer vampires.

One scene has a chainsaw frenzy in which various vampires lose limbs at 2 seconds at a time. However when the story gets in the way of the gore you're just asking for some negative feedback. The movie is mostly made of kids running away, vampires catching up and getting messy with art supply red paint and Hines ketchup and showing what horror core movies can do to the unsuspecting low tolerance movie goer. You do need a stomach to view the film but it's nothing a beer and a Dominoes pizza can't fix.

The final scene has an army of vampires march into the sun and melt away, topping off the bloody and seemingly never ending gruesome destruction of the vamps.

Throughout the film I was guessing which hero or vampire was Leif Jonkers. Vampires in the mid western states may sound outrageous but it goes to show you sick minds everywhere are selling their souls to make a decent horror-core movies.